I READ with interest this week the comments from Professor John Ashton, Chair of the UK Public Health Association, about unfair heating bills.

As one of Britain’s leading public health experts, the Woolton-born academic, who was previously a senior lecturer at the Liverpool Medical School in the early 1980s, is calling for a radical overhaul of energy pricing policy to help reduce winter deaths.

But as well as helping prevent health problems, his suggestions would also radically help the environment.

For Professor Ashton wants energy companies to reverse current pricing schemes which charge the most for the first energy units a household uses and makes them cheaper as consumption rises.

He argues that switching the practice of rewarding greater consumption with reduced per-unit costs would make it easier for low income households to heat their homes during winter and help to reduce winter deaths.

Last winter saw 25,400 more deaths in England and Wales, compared with the average. Last month was the coldest December in 100 years and one of the coldest months ever recorded in the UK.

Here, here I say, and about time someone started talking sense about encouraging us all to use less energy.